In Between Subjects

"Amelia Jones has written another essential book. In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performancedeftly traces post-WWII theories, practices, and poetics of relationality and queer performativity across a globally diverse range of performance-based artworks. The back-stories she brings to the fore, and the genealogies she illuminates for readers are punctuated by movingly visceral and highly local accounts in which the author performs her relations to the art works she summons to account. This book will be a vital companion not only for art historians and performance theorists but for all whose inquiries into art making, life making, and world making congregate under or otherwise gesture toward capacious, critical, and affirmative queerness."

Rebecca Schneider, Brown University

"Deftly moving between the personal and historical, Amelia Jones dives into the concept of queerness such that its conjunction with performance unfurls into the fraught territories of race, coloniality, and the nature of presence. Jones anchors these unruly genealogies with meditations on performances so that the question of betweenness hovers in the air, always moving between what has already been done and what can be done. How have we learned to think about performance and how can queerness help us undo that?"

Amber Jamilla Musser, George Washington University

"Amelia Jones has written another essential book. In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance deftly traces post-WWII theories, practices, and poetics of relationality and queer performativity across a globally diverse range of performance-based artworks. The back-stories she brings to the fore, and the genealogies she illuminates for readers are punctuated by movingly visceral and highly local accounts in which the author performs her relations to the art works she summons to account. This book will be a vital companion not only for art historians and performance theorists but for all whose inquiries into art making, life making, and world making congregate under or otherwise gesture toward capacious, critical, and affirmative queerness."

Rebecca Schneider, Brown University

"Deftly moving between the personal and historical, Amelia Jones dives into the concept of queerness such that its conjunction with performance unfurls into the fraught territories of race, coloniality, and the nature of presence. Jones anchors these unruly genealogies with meditations on performances so that the question of betweenness hovers in the air, always moving between what has already been done and what can be done. How have we learned to think about performance and how can queerness help us undo that?"

Amber Jamilla Musser, George Washington University

"In this remarkable study, Amelia Jones critically examines the genealogy of the concepts of “queer”, “performance”, and “performativity”. The author mobilizes—in a non-hierarchical way—multiple sources, such as art history and pop culture, performance, gender, and postcolonial studies, as well as her individual experiences of queer and queer-related topics, seeking to question and problematize the dominance of Western-centrist and mostly white discourses around these concepts."

Sasha Pevak, Critique d'art

“Jones’s book plunges right into the fault lines that exists between queer and performance, self and other, viewer and viewed, and stands as a resource for how to stay aware of, if uncomfortably, our own implication within scholarship.”

Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Bulletin, 106:2.

“Carefully juxtaposing works from disparate “temporalities, energies, sites, and historical frameworks” (332), Jones invites the reader to inhabit the productive “discomfort of finding ourselves in between.”

Fabien Maltais-Bayda, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 30:1.